Sunday, 29 April 2012

It
was cock-up, not conspiracy. The clue's there. Bristol lost its
state of the art multimodal transport interchange because someone
behind the Temple Quarter initiative got a bit overconfident with the
predictive texting.

'Bus'
became 'business'. George O was hooked. In came the cash. And
out went the bus station.

The
big event was on Plot 3 – except for now it's to be known as
'Creative Common'. (Don't run away with any ideas that this is in
any way a common, though. Bristol doesn't do commons). A (only
slightly leaky) Big Top provided the venue.

First
in were 200 invited businesses, to get a progress report on the
Enterprise Zone's development and opportunies. The literature
suggests they were subjected to a tidal wave of hype; I can't help
wondering whether hard-headed businessmen are really vulnerable to
this sort of thing, and if they are, what makes their judgement
so much better than the rest of us can manage.

Then
it was time for us plebs. We were treated instead to a sparky free
display of entertaining skills much better suited to the venue. All
credit to them, and the kids especially loved it. I gather that
the Big Top is going to stay there through the summer, and maybe come
back next season too.

But
for us, there was little about what's going to happen in this key
part of our city; just a few display boards mostly filled with
artists' impressions of THE VISION. Those pictures were indeed
visionary in much the same way as a dream is: they don't really hold
together in the light of day, and raise many more questions than they
answer.

One
thing was clear, though. The display pictures, like the media hype
beforehand, includeNOTHING about the council's or the
Enterprise Partnership's promise of a modern transport interchange
– in fact the only indication of any 'onward' transport for
arriving passengers was a BRT stop in the Friary. Here's one of the
pics; make of it what you will.

It was mere chance, but immediately afterwards, a steam train
pulled in to Temple Meads – headed by a locomotive that drew the
crowds at the 1951 Festival of Britain - extending the general
feeling of unreality

Thursday, 19 April 2012

First,
the progressive loss of chunks of the Green Belt in Ashton Vale,
abandoned by the authorities who should be protecting it. Now the
battle moves east, into BaNES territory between Stockwood and
Whitchurch Village.

Here,
developer Robert Hitchins has come back with an appeal to the
Planning Inspectorate against BaNES' refusal to allow a housing development of close on 300 unitsacross the green belt pastureland that separates the two communities
on this south-eastern edge of Bristol.

Big question now: is the
new planning regime, with its much publicised presumption in favour
of 'sustainable' development, strong enough to override the bid ?

It
should be easy for the Inspector to say 'No', in spite of George
Osborne's enthusiasm for removing anything that might get in the way
of developers' ambitions. The National Planning Policy that finally
emerged from Whitehall last month does include (at p.19) continuing
protection for Green Belt land like this. For that, we can thank intensive lobbying by a number of pressure groups in the run-up
to publication.

“The
word sustainable is very important, what it means is there is a test
of whether it is in the public interest to approve an application. If
there are reasons, it destroys the environment, if it builds on
greenbelt, if it builds outside a town centre when it's a commercial
premises when you want to keep a town centre thriving, that would not
be sustainable, it would not be in the public interest and thereforce
it would not go ahead “

The
site itself is a group of three fields, criss-crossed by four public
footpaths*, mostly used for grazing ponies. It's an edge-of-town
location, with the neighbouring built-up area almost entirely made up
of houses, so this development would simply add to an 'urban
monoculture' leaving others to provide essential infrastructure such
as schools, transport, etc, which are already thin on the ground,
while leaving the new residents to reach employment and entertainment
at considerable distance from the new estate. Sustainable, eh?

Friday, 6 April 2012

This
little lot, hauled out from no more than 50m2 of the
woodland edge behind it, was just one small part of the litter and
flytipping recovered from the parts of Stockwood targetted in a
litter-pick on April 1st.

Extracting
it from the woods and open spaces certainly reinforces anyone's
misanthropic leanings, but more positively it encourages reflection
on the throwaway society, waste collection strategies, and how the
hell we're going to manage when our planet acquires a new plasticised
aluminised skin of snack food wrappers. (Maybe its reflective
quality will compensate for the diminishing polar ice cover and we
needn't worry about climate change after all? Or maybe not.)

So
why do people throw it away? Not the casual thoughtless littering,
but the more serious, calculated stuff, which can involve shifting
heavy items a long way off-road.

Like this stuff, dumped a good
100m along the path by Brislington Brook and slowly spread during the
following week. Smaller than most fly-tips, but fairly typical of a
partial house clearance, this was brought over from Withywood and
just dropped, without any attempt at concealment. Possibly by the
occupier named on the bills among the waste, more likely by the
landlord, or maybe by white van man. I just hope the enforcement
people make a better job of finding out than May Gurney made of
clearing it.

One
reason for the tipping must be that there's little risk of getting
caught, and it would be good to see much more effective enforcement.
Another's the sheer volume of stuff we're urged to throw away to
make room for something else in an unsustainable economy that relies
on ever increasing consumption. And another's the cost of disposing
of it (especially commercial waste).

Ideally,
disposal costs would be free at point of use, and met by a levy built
into the price of goods to reflect their true costs. Can't see that
happening though. Equally unlikely (and unfair too) would be a free
'bulk load' disposal service provided by the council at public
expense. Maybe a compromise would be a mobile 'bring' site –
meaning skips - on a regular rota, where residents could bring their
excess property, then left awhile for those of us who might find a
use for it, and the residue removed later.

No
doubt Mr Pickles (whom Damien Hirst preserve) and the Daily Mail
would put the whole problem down to the evil of fortnightly doorstep
collection of residual waste, which, they claim, infringes the basic rights
of every Englishman. Wasn't it good to see that Pickles' bribe to
councils to revert to weekly residual waste collections was taken up
by just one council (Gloucester city) ; all the other bidders have
had the good sense to seek funding instead for such as segregated
food waste collection.

Food
waste recycling - that's an initiative which, I would argue, did more
to demonstrate Bristol's status as a progressive modern city than any
new stadium or arena could possibly have done.

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Everybody
has a bit of a moan about the way the council's run. Often, the
citicism is well founded, but then democracy and consensus politics
was never going to be as easy as sniping from the sidelines.

So
along comes a bloke with a remedy, and a few 'wait and see' promises
to persuade us to use it. Why not scrap the old system, he says,
and have a nice Mayor instead? You can even choose who it is.

He
insists on an answer on May 3rd.

You
look at local government and know it's one of those situations where,
as they say, something must be done. The coalition government is
proposing something. So why not do it?

In
the past, there have been plenty of alternative 'somethings'
suggested, not least by the Greens. Some of them are listed, with
reasons, on this newly released leaflet.

Yes,
there's lots that's wrong with what we have, and councillors
themselves often have to struggle with it.

We
could certainly have a fairer, more representative, voting system.

We
could make our elected reps more accountable, with a 'recall' system
such as the Greens have already signed up to
on a voluntary basis (other parties found all sorts of excuses not
to).

We
could change council procedure, so that it's less easy to abuse
simply to score cheap party points.

We
could strengthen the local, neighbourhood, element of our democracy,
which is woefully lacking at present.

Concentrating
all the power in the hands of a single, perhaps more personally
ambitious and charismatic, 'leader' figure seems to be going in
completely the wrong direction.

About this Blog

This one's from the little known Bristolian outpost of Stockwood, first settled by city expats back in the fifties. Leafy, open, and close to the countryside.... until they grub up the Green Belt and open spaces to build an 'urban extension'.

Written by an adoptive Stockwoodsman, arrived from the wild north-east back in 2004, this blog sets out to look at Stockwood and Bristol issues, mostly from a green perspective